Georgetown Prof Defends Islamic Slavery

This news item stands out if only because — at last! — reality beats Houellebecq. Who’d a thunk? Or maybe Houellebecq was prophetical in his novel, “Soumission”.

What’s he talking about? News that Jonathan Brown, a tenured Georgetown professor and holder of the Al-Waleed bin Talal Chair in Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University, has delivered a lecture defending slavery and rape non-consensual sex. Umar Lee, a Muslim who heard the lecture and was offended by it, posted about it here. He wrote:

While the lecture was supposed to be about slavery in Islam Brown spent the majority of the lecture talking about slavery in the United States, the United Kingdom and China. When discussing slavery in these societies Brown painted slavery as brutal and violent (which it certainly was). When the conversation would briefly flip to historic slavery in the Arab and Turkish would slavery was described by Brown in glowing terms. Indeed, according to Brown, slaves in the Muslim World lived a pretty good life.

I thought the Muslim community was done with this dishonest North Korean style of propaganda. Obviously not. Brown went on to discuss the injustices of prison labor in America and a myriad of other social-ills. Absent from his talk (until challenged) was any recognition of the rampant abuse of workers in the Gulf, the thousands of workers in the Gulf dying on construction sites, the South Asian child camel-jockeys imported into the United Arab Emirates to race camels under harsh conditions, or the horrific conditions of prisoners in the Muslim World (the latest news being 13,000 prisoners executed in Syria).

Brown constructs a world where the wrongs of the West excuse any wrongs (if he believes there are any) in the Muslim World.

“Slavery wasn’t racialized” in Muslim societies, Brown stated. That would be believable if it weren’t well-known black people in the Arab World and African-Americans in this country weren’t constantly referred to as abeed (slaves) simply because the color of the skin.

Brown described slavery in the Muslim World as kinder and gentler. The Arab poet who wrote “before you buy the slave buy the stick… for he is nejas (impure)” is perhaps a better description of Arab slavery than what Brown offered.
“Slaves were protected by shariah (Islamic Law)” Brown stated with no recognition of the idealized legal version of slavery and slavery as it was practiced. In this version of slavery there is an omission of kidnappings, harems, armies of eunuchs, and other atrocities.

Just past the 1:00 mark, Brown says that slavery under Islamic law was not comparable to chattel slavery in the American South, in part because the slaves of Muslims had rights. He said it was in fact comparable to feudalism in medieval Europe — something “social,” not “economic.” When the questioner persists in his challenge to Brown’s take on slavery in Islam, Brown goes on to say that it’s an undeniable fact that Muhammad held slaves.

“Are you more morally mature than the Prophet of God?” Brown says. “No, you’re not.”

So, there you have it. If Muhammad held slaves, how bad could slavery really be?

It’s a challenging point, actually: if the Prophet behaved in a certain way, who are Muslims today to stand in judgment of him and what he did? If we say that slavery is evil, are we not implicitly condemning the Prophet as an evildoer? Can a Muslim do that and still be a good Muslim? I don’t know.

It’s worth pointing out that in the New Testament, St. Paul doesn’t condemn slaveholding, which was common in his day, nor does he explicitly endorse it. He simply recognizes it as a fact of life, and tells slaves and slaveholders how to treat each other. (See here for more information.) However, the principles of Christianity led in modern times to the rejection of slavery among Christians. To canonize someone as a saint does not mean that they led perfect lives, only that the led lives of heroic Christian virtue. The only perfectly sinless life was that of Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless, it is worth considering whether or not Islam today has within it the resources to oppose slavery, which continues to exist in some Muslim countries. The line I quote above can be used to justify slavery (if Muhammad held slaves, who are Muslims to condemn other Muslims who own slaves?), or, I suppose, to undermine confidence in Muhammad and his teaching.

He also says that it’s not helpful to talk about slavery in turns of some people owning others. I don’t know why it’s not helpful to do that, because that’s what slavery is. The BBC has a useful explainer about Islam and slavery, going into the phenomenon contextually and historically. But slavery, whether practiced by Christians, Muslims, or pagans, is about people owning other people, period.

On the matter of concubines — in Muslim society, female sex slaves imprisoned in a harem — Brown says that we can’t judge past civilizations by our own sexual standards, because “we think of people as autonomous agents, and the consent of those autonomous agents is what makes a sexual act acceptable.” He goes on:

“For most of human history, human beings have not thought of consent as the essential feature of morally correct sexual activity. And second, we fetishize the idea of autonomy to where we forget, who is really free? … What does autonomy mean?”

Well, he’s correct about that — to a point. It is not right to judge older societies by standards common today. Sexual autonomy — and individual autonomy — is a late modern development.

However, Brown goes deep into sophistry when he says that historically, a concubine’s autonomy is not that different from a wife’s autonomy, because all women in all pre-modern societies were not free to marry who they wanted to marry, but only the man their families wanted them to marry. Brown asks what is the real difference between a sex slave in Islam (who might have been well-treated by her master) and a medieval Christian woman who had to marry a man she may not have loved, and who had a miserable life with him?

“The difference between these people is not that big,” Brown claims.

Um, wow.

Says the academic — a Catholic — who pointed this lecture out to me:

I defend his freedom to express himself. I defend the right of professors, be they full-time tenured or part-time adjuncts, to express their opinions without fear of recrimination or losing their job.

The issue lays in the responsibility of the Catholic Church, to whom the Society of Jesus owes allegiance, and under whose charge Georgetown University is administered. This university employs a tenured professor — protected by the Bill of Rights and the American traditions of academic freedom — who is an apologist of slavery. One may say, he’s not defending slavery, he’s helping relativise our own parochial, American concepts of slavery to better appreciate the condition of slaves – or rather “slaves” (in “quotes”) – in the Arab world. One may say that the Catholic Church has employed apologists of slavery in the past. Who am I to judge? Who are you? Who is anybody? Whose justice? Which rationality?

As an academic, I find this sophistry troubling but not surprising – such intellectual laziness (often generously endowed by patrons pulling the strings) has been around a looooong time. As a Catholic, I find this very problematic. Very. Problematic.

It’s already an interesting 21st century.

In other words, what is a Catholic university doing employing a professor who defends slavery, including sexual slavery, to the point of equating it with Christian marriage?

Al-Waleed bin Talal, the Saudi bllionaire who funds that professorship at Georgetown, is the grandson of an Armenian Christian woman who escaped the 1915 Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks, and who was presented to King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, founder of the Saudi dynasty, when she was 12 years old. She was likely an Orthodox Christian child (Armenians are Orthodox) captured and pressed into slavery by Muslims. She could have been a concubine, but he made her his wife. In those days, less than a century ago:

An immense slave corps, mostly of African origin, now served the royal family and its palaces. But if Abdulaziz had begun his career as a tribal chieftain, he was now an oriental potentate holding sway over the vastness of Arabia and a kingdom needed a new palace for its king. In 1935 – just two years after the state of Saudi Arabia was proclaimed – work was begun on the last great mud-built palace in the Najd murabba (square).

And:

Abdulaziz had been prodigiously fertile, taking brides in order to co-opt one or another tribe or to mend relations with cadet branches of the al-Saud. Abdulaziz, as a unitarian Wahhabi, had been a sternly devout Muslim and as such never had more than four legal wives at a time. But these were regularly divorced and rotated as his whims and passions warranted. And the king had also made ample use of slave-girls and concubines. In this, he had held fast to an Islamic tradition that allowed rulers to take women as chattel in addition to the four wives allotted under Sharia law.

More:

In 1921, Abdulaziz had been busy wiping out the last traces of resistance among his al-Rashid rivals in the Great Nafud desert to the north of Riyadh. In triumph he and his warriors visited the emir, or prince, of Unayza, a large desert trading post halfway to the Iraqi border. In the emir’s palace, according to family members, Abdulaziz was presented with a beautiful 12-year-old girl, Munayer.

Munayer’s father, it is thought, was most likely an Armenian Christian from eastern Anatolia. His wife certainly was. Six years earlier, in 1915, the family had been forced to flee in terror before the vast anti-Armenian massacres of that year. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of Armenians who fled west to Athens or Beirut, Munayer, her father, mother, and two other siblings traveled southward, along old caravan routes, deep into the interior of Wahhabi Arabia. It was a strange choice for a Christian family. They may have been too terrified to reason carefully. Or perhaps they intended to head for Lebanon or even Persia – safe havens then for fleeing Armenians – and simply got lost.

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244 Responses to Georgetown Prof Defends Islamic Slavery

The Autist Formerly Known as “KD”: [E]ven God’s goodness is beyond good and evil as we comprehend them….

If that’s so, then it’s meaningless. God’s goodness may be analogical, but there has to be some basis for the analogy. Otherwise one might as well say that the Black Death or the Holocaust was in some mysterious way “good” (Life belongs to God, after all).

God, as manifest in the world, manifests as goodness, so it is not meaningless. However, the hidden unmanifest God, who we describe as “Omnibenevolent”, is beyond human conceptions of either good or evil. Hence, it is always with fear and trembling we approach the Holy of Holies.

The Holocaust, being a result of a series of voluntary acts of men, is not good in a similar way. Unless you believe Hitler was the true viceregent of God on Earth, imposing God’s will on the planet (which neither you nor I believe), we can’t say that the Holocaust comported with God’s Will.

There are some historical problems with the accounts of genocide in the OT, but putting them aside, if we accept the authority of the OT, then we have to see the genocide commanded in the OT as good and consistent with God’s Will.

This may be a stumbling block to some, but it is not comparable to the Nazi’s, because no one supposes the Nazi’s were carrying out a divine mandate. They were simply trying to purify the race based on Darwinistic and ideological grounds. Moreover, the conquest of Israel, if it happened, happened in the remote past, and we can hope that people have evolved since that time, as many have on the question of slavery.

Turmarion, thanks for your thoughtful post. I’ll have to check out your blog when I have a moment.

You wrote: God said, “Thou shalt not kill,” period, unequivocally. No word about ultimate salvation or not, and in fact at a time when the Jews didn’t believe in an afterlife. Genocide is wrong because unjust killing (and if pacifists are right, all killing is unjust; but certainly genocide is unjust killing) is always wrong. Simple.

After your somewhat nuanced discussion before this, I was a bit taken aback by your appeal to the Law of God: He said “do not kill”–therefore, we cannot kill. But then, what if God commanded “thou shalt kill” or “thou shalt steal”? If God’s command makes something, by definition, moral or immoral, then how can we turn around and say “if God is this way, then He is a monster”? No–in essence, I think most nowadays look to Torah when it happily coincides with their non-divine ethical system, and reject it as a barbaric relic of a primitive time when it goes against that system which is passionately defended as not only moral, but more moral than any other system imagined, and God’s position is irrelevant.

That, to me, is the supreme conciet: not that our concept of God may be wrong (it may indeed be so); but that somehow a Being wise and powerful enough to form Quasars, Galaxies, Monarch butterflies and human brains, is somehow a moral cripple. That, to me, is shockingly naïve.

The Georgetown professor reminds me of a character in Amin Maalouf’s novel “Leo Africanus”, Astaghfirullah (I beseech God’s forgiveness) who was portrayed as very zealous, if not unbearable, in his defense of Islamic orthodoxy and criticism of the waywardness of others. The novel is set in 15th century Grenada (Spain) at the time of the Reconquista where there are Muslims and other populations, some of them relatively recently converted to Islam. Astaghfirullah’s real name was unknown to most people, but he was known to have been the son of a Christian convert to Islam – he was described as a blond-haired sheikh – thus explaining why he was so zealous, so adamant, so over the top, in his pronouncements on religion & mores. His foil in the novel was Abou Amr, a doctor (well-read in philosophy) who was the son and grand-son of cadis. He was surnamed “Abou-Khamr” (“Father Alcohol”), due to his love for wine. Abou-Khamr was more lax, and relaxed, than the blondhaired son of a convert because he didn’t have to prove to anyone his attachment or fidelity to Islam. Astaghfirullah, on the other hand, did. He preached the letter of the law of Islam, but had little feel for the spirit.
So, here we have a certain professor of the Jesuit Georgetown, recently converted to Islam, comes across as more Muslim than born-and-bred Muslims, even to point of defending slavery, astaghfirullah!

I would hope Umar Lee wasn’t all that surprised by Brown’s deflection towards America and why we are the bain of Islam’s existence. You can see it here in his own words: https://youtu.be/NVlgWWpsIoc. Towards the end he starts to defend Holy Land terror associations and others.

One of your commenters quotes another: “I don’t think putting in a good word for American slavery every now and then should be out of bounds” and says “It sure as hell is.”

I’m a conservative (in many things) who is usually willing to give reactionary ideas at least a thought, but I agree with the second writer. American slavery was worse than other kinds for several reasons, in spite of its perhaps better material conditions and stricter laws regarding the treatment of slaves: (1) Those who established it, if not their descendants, knew that slavery was wrong. (2) It was consistently racial in its definition of slavery, while Muslim empires enslaved anyone of any colour (even if they did equate black skin with slavery, as someone wrote in this thread), and the Greeks regarded any foreigner as worthy of slavery. Chauvinistic, but at least in such a system one is less likely to feel marked out for degradation by mere sight. (3)It was designed that way intentionally: the early colonists and the philosophers who supported them (like Lock), thought that the problem of ‘inequality’ that was created by the presence of landless laborers would be too much of a threat to this new kind of society. So they – if I am remembering correctly – decided to enslave a people sufficiently primitive, in their eyes, to benefit by European civilization, and sufficiently foreign in appearance and social customs that poorer whites would not be likely to identify and make common cause with them. As slaves, too, AFricans would not have to be armed.

We tend to forget today just how difficult the ordinary chores of life were for people before the modern era. Housework, vegetable gardens and farms required continual care and labour. If the United States was to be made up of freeholders all farming their own land, who was going to do all the extra work that the ‘better sort’ would need in order to be able to read, write and have any leisure? If they imported servants to help, that would only recreate the conditions of Europe and its chaos and social unrest. On the other hand, if the colonists decided on a rude universal equality without slaves or servants, who would have the time to educate himself? With slaves, however, they could bypass these issues.

It seems like a monstrously self-serving attitude to us now, and indeed it was, but the problems were real and not easy to resolve.

@Turmarion, thanks for your response. I suppose I fixate less on one self being true and the other false, and more that the two entities are not the same. But I suppose your faith commitments mean that you so see one as true and the other false as an article of faith.

)It was designed that way intentionally: the early colonists and the philosophers who supported them (like Lock), thought that the problem of ‘inequality’ that was created by the presence of landless laborers would be too much of a threat to this new kind of society. So they – if I am remembering correctly – decided to enslave a people sufficiently primitive, in their eyes, to benefit by European civilization, and sufficiently foreign in appearance and social customs that poorer whites would not be likely to identify and make common cause with them. As slaves, too, AFricans would not have to be armed.

The notion that slavery was “planned,” much less by philosophers, is ludicrous. There were many deliberate decisions along the way, but no visionary scheme of social planning at work.

The roots of slavery in America lie with the sugar plantations of the Mediterranean. The work, then and ever after, was difficult, tedious, taxing, sometimes deadly. Obviously, Muslims deemed it fit work for captive Christians and Christians for captive Muslims. The Portuguese were the first to expand outside of the Mediterranean, into various Atlantic islands, and to explore the coasts of Africa, and the new labor supply was obvious.

Then the cultivation hopped across the Atlantic after Columbus tripped over the continent trying to find the way to India. Brazil absorbed 55 percent of the Africans transported across the Atlantic, because it had the largest area given to sugar cultivation. But the Caribbean absorbed a few too. With the commerce of the Atlantic awash with commodified Africans, some were bound to end up in North America.

Labor had been done by indentured servants from England, and initially that is who the small number of Africans were set to work alongside of. The profane language of the ghetto is basically the profane language of the under-class of South Devon, transported in lieu of hanging for petty theft. Large concentrations of slaves were found in southerly states, such as South Carolina, but smaller numbers were found in more northern climates — they were available, they were purchased, there was rather little moral question. THEN people began rationalizing what they had done, and were continuing to do. Rice, indigo, cotton, made slave labor integral to the American economy.

But its true about the ordinary chores of life. In the late 18th century, a good 1/8 of the population of Europe was absorbed into the need for domestic servants in even the more humble family abodes. That was not absent from America, and through the 19th century, a perusal of census records shows once again even families of rather modest means had a servant or two. By no means did slavery do away with this — otherwise, the northern states would have had ample reason to keep slavery legal.

“KD”: For salvation of the faithful to have meaning, it must also be limited, or salvation has no consequence or importance. In fact, the more limited salvation is, the greater the importance of being saved.

By which logic the greatest good would be for one to be saved and all others to be damned! This is absurd on the face of it. As to killing, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that not only are we not to kill, we’re not even to insult others (Matthew 5:21-22), and he replaces “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” with “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39-41).

I reiterate that while God is above human conceptions, if his actions in the world involve things not intelligibly good (e.g. commanding genocide and infanticide) then it is no longer meaningful to call God “good”. As C. S. Lewis said, to say that whatever God commands is ipso facto “good” doesn’t distinguish Him from an omnipotent demon.

I accept the authority of the Old Testament insofar as it’s properly interpreted. The world was clearly not created in six days, no one tried to build a tower to heaven, and no worldwide flood ever occurred. Likewise, one has to be very careful with all the savage stuff attributed to God. I tend to take it allegorically or as fossilized notions of the barbaric tribes of the time. I do not believe God commanded genocide, full stop. If you want to believe in such a God, have at it.

Daniel, I was a bit rushed in my last response. Essentially I agree with Socrates: Murder, theft, etc. are not wrong because God commands against them; He commands against them because they’re intrinsically wrong. I take the Ten Commandments–which Jews and Christians alike agree in putting in a special category aside from all the other commandments in the Bible–as statements of such truths that are holy of themselves, and which God acknowledges as such in commanding them to us.

I also hold to the tenets of classical theism, according to which God is immutable. He doesn’t change or change His mind. Thus, He won’t say, “Thou shalt not kill,” and then turn around and say, “But kill every one that pisseth against the wall.”

My broader point was that it might be difficult to explain exactly why it’s wrong to kill (though pretty much everyone agrees that killing is wrong); but whatever reason one comes up with, the punishment for said killing is not the relevant factor. If someone murders and never gets caught, it’s still wrong. An atheist would believe that there would be no future justice, either when the murderer dies; and yet he’d still agree that murder is wrong.

In short, we don’t need a hell for wrong and evil to be able to evaluate things as–well, wrong and evil. Does that make sense?

Certainly, I don’t think a being “wise and powerful enough to form Quasars, Galaxies, Monarch butterflies and human brains” is a moral cripple–which is why I don’t think He ordered genocide!

As an atheist, I believe there is a simple explanation for why the God of the Old Testament commanded genocide and slavery even though he is supposed to be the good guy. From the wiki entry for “Thou shalt not kill,” we learn the following:

“Deuteronomy 20:10-18 establishes rules on killing civilians in warfare:
– the population of cities outside of the Promised Land, if they surrender, should be made tributaries and left alive (20:10-11)
– those cities outside of the Promised Land that resist should be besieged, and once they fall, the male population should be exterminated, but the women and children should be left alive (20:12-15)
– of those cities that were within the Promised Land, however, everybody was to be killed.”

Occam’s razor explanation:

i) The Israelites of the Old Testament were a bunch of thugs.
ii) Churchill once said history would be kind to him because he intended to write it. The Old Testament is kind to the Israelites because they wrote it, justifying their thuggery by claiming that their God made them do it.
iii) A few hundred years later, Jesus came along and tried to reform these thugs. He was remarkably ahead of his times in his morality so he was promptly killed for his efforts.
iv) A few hundred years later, Muhammad came along and revived the old time thuggery in spades.
v) Since it is difficult to acknowledge that your belief system comes from the post facto rationalizations of a bunch of Middle East thugs, people try endlessly to reconcile the thuggery with their innate sense of justice and fairness, versions of which can found even in capuchin monkeys.

In short, (i) there is no God, (ii) the Israelites were a bunch of thugs, (iii) Jesus was a good guy and should be emulated, and (iv) if capuchin monkeys can have a sense of fair-play and justice, there is no reason why we humans cannot develop the same values, given enough time.

Daniel, I was a bit rushed in my last response. Essentially I agree with Socrates: Murder, theft, etc. are not wrong because God commands against them; He commands against them because they’re intrinsically wrong.

It seems that the implication here is this: there exists along side of God, at least one other eternal thing, independent of Him: the moral law. That may not be what you meant, but that’s how I understand what you’re expressing.

Some might say that God is arbitrary or capricious, but that since He’s positionally Lord of the universe, what He wills is true by the nature of that authority. This is Lewis’ “monster god” idea. I think we both reject that.

I think what you’re saying is that there is an eternal moral law to which God is compelled to submit, because He is good…that God’s nature is to be good, and this the moral law essentially dictates His actions. That, even if He wanted to do something evil, He could not. I reject this (and I could be wrong about this being your understanding).

Rather, my belief if this: God’s nature, in addition to being omnipotent, all-knowing, eternal, etc, is that He is good. His nature is to act in goodness. Just as we humans always act according to our human nature (and dogs act like dogs, and stars act like stars, etc), God always acts according to His divine nature.

Now, it could be that I’ve misunderstood you, but when you speak of certain actions as being “intrinsicly wrong” it suggests to be the second position. You might think that I’ve misunderstood you, but here’s where you might see a distinction: in tautology–the purpose of goodness, the purpose of God’s actions, the purpose of all creation and the meaning of existence.

When you speak of salvation as a good, damnation as an evil, murder as wrong, enslaving others as an evil, etc, what is in those states or actions that makes them wrong or bad or evil?

Generally, it’s the idea of creaturely comfort and happiness. It’s a very creature-centric view of goodness.

Often, there is a coincidence between creaturely comfort and bliss and goodness, but that does not make this comfort the telos of the universe. If it does, it tends to turn upside down our view of the role of God and the role of His creation. It can make our focus become our comfort and pleasure, and essentially make God our servant: He exists so that He might create us, and keep us happy.

Included in worship is, of course, a sense of thankfulness for what God has done to us and for us. But I see a great danger that a creature-centric view of morality can easily be a presumption that says “God, I thank you for being good to me…and if you ever stop being good to me, well, we’re done, and I’m rejecting you.”

Of course, it’s a pretty human reaction that when people treat us well, we feel affection towards them, and when we perceive they’re hurting us, we dislike or hate them. It’s only natural.

But when we take this same perspective to God, we’re in danger of two things: (1) in the traditional sense, impiety–who do we think we are, questioning God? Dawkins and other defiant skeptics gaun a perverse sense of pleasure in this impiety, of course, essentially giving the finger to a Being the consider monstrous (not that they even think He exists).

But the other, more fundamental reason this is folly: (2) it’s the rejection of the foundation if reality, the Creator and Sustainer of all that was, is, and ever will be. It’s the rejection if the One who created you down to your tiniest detail, and knows human nature in general and your nature specifically in an intimate way that you can never imagine. It’s as nonsensical as railing against the wetness of water, or the fact that your hand has five digits, or demonstrating against Pi or screaming at the color yellow.

Rather than goodness being measured by creaturly comfort or pleasure, this is my measure of goodness: whatever brings the greatest glory to God.

Now, Dawkins and others might immediately dismis this as God being an insufferable egotist, demanding glory and worshipbto pat His divine ego, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s nature, on at least two levels. First, it makes the rather childish assumption that praise of God is like the praise of fallible human beings–beings who fail constantly, who have tiny fragments of knowledge, who can be bribed and cajoled into helping us. (Many pagans view their gods in this way, so this is understandable).

It assumes that God somehow needs us in any way. He does not. His glory is transcendent, and existed long before creatiin. Kim Jon Un is nothing without North Korea; Stalin was nothing without the Soviet Union. But God is still as glorious without creation.

It also assumes that somehow, if we give glory to God, we somehow lose more than we gain. In an odd way, the ultimate hedonism is to give glory to God–for we are created for this purpose, and our joy can only be fully realized in worship.

It’s like the story of the eagle’s egg found by a chicken. The egg hatched, and so the eagle was raised as a chicken–scratching the ground to eat seeds and bugs, never flying, never realizing its own nature.

But God calls us to soar with Him in His glory. That is why He created us. It’s not to make us happy, but joy unspeakable is a wonderful benefit from our existence in God’s glory.

Now, you might debate certain aspects of what brings God the greatest glory. You might argue that saving all people gives Him greater glory, and you mught debate that the Bible is in error in what it claims about God. But I really think that a creation-centric idea of goodness is a fundamental limitation and misunderstanding of the nature if ultimate goodness.

My word ‘designed’ (and your word ‘planned’) with regard to slavery in the American colonies was, I concede, a misdirection of the issues, although unintentional. But the essential points I made were still accurate. The intellectual and legal history of the attempt to create a legal justification of taking control of the new continent’s land for farms and plantations shows this fairly clearly. People like Locke (who was on the Council of Trade and Plantations (1673–74) and a member also of the Board of Trade (1696–1700)) and his patrons and friends in government, really
did build an elaborate series of legal pretensions for allowing slavery and the seizure of aboriginal lands. To call this sort of ex post facto rationalization ‘planning’ or ‘design’ is, as I admitted, wrong. But it was not unimportant to the American enterprise all the same.

I wanted to add that the presence of indentured white servants and other landless white laborers in the colonies was not much approved by theorists of American republicanism, from what I understand. They were not able to prevent it from happening, but it did, in their view, threaten to replicate the inequality of life in Britain and the continent. Their vision was founded upon an ideal in which all *citizens* – slaves were not, of course, citizens – had land. Other kinds of inequality were inevitable, they believed – and in this I suspect they were right – but that at least was the foundation of the republic.

It seems that the implication here is this: there exists along side of God, at least one other eternal thing, independent of Him: the moral law.

That is the typical criticism of Socrates’ perspective in Euthyphro–that it sets up a further thing–the moral law–over and above God/the gods. I would be OK with that, but it’s not my position. My position is that God is identical with the moral law. Thus, as you say farther down, “God’s nature, in addition to being omnipotent, all-knowing, eternal, etc, is that He is good. His nature is to act in goodness.” I don’t disagree.

When you speak of salvation as a good, damnation as an evil, murder as wrong, enslaving others as an evil, etc, what is in those states or actions that makes them wrong or bad or evil?

According to 1 Timothy 2:3-4, “This is good and pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” If God desires all to be saved, it must be that salvation is a supreme good, and damnation an evil. That logically follows. As to most other things, of course it’s complicated. What is comfortable is not necessarily what’s good, and vice versa. Certainly God is not our butler, not an omnipotent Jeeves there to smooth every aspect of our lives.

You might argue that saving all people gives Him greater glory, and you mught debate that the Bible is in error in what it claims about God.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the rest of your post, but I definitely agree with the above. Even Abraham argued with God on the grounds of justice re the annihilation of Sodom; so I don’t think it’s inappropriate or disrespectful to argue that it would be unjust to damn people for eternity for finite (however large) sins (and I know it’s been argued that all sins, being against God ultimately, are infinite, but I think that’s a problematic formulation that I don’t want to get into here). However, to put it in the terms you put it, I certainly think universal salvation would give much greater glory to God than the damnation of most or even of some; and I certainly fail to see how commanding the slaughter of whole populations, including the innocent, would give him glory.

God is far beyond us of course, and is the ground of being. However, if his goodness is not at least somewhat intelligible to us it’s hard to see how it’s meaningful or how it reflects His glory. Beyond a certain point, as Lewis acknowledged, you might as well be talking of an omnipotent demon who glorifies himself with carnage and oppression. We both certainly agree that God is not like that!

KD”: For salvation of the faithful to have meaning, it must also be limited, or salvation has no consequence or importance. In fact, the more limited salvation is, the greater the importance of being saved.

By which logic the greatest good would be for one to be saved and all others to be damned! This is absurd on the face of it.

Tumarion:

You are a very smart man, and so it saddens me to see that you substitute the word “good” for the word “importance”. I agree that if “good = importance”, then my argument is absurd. However, I don’t for a second view “importance” as the only or highest good, and therefore, your “refutation” is a straw man.

As I think you know, I don’t rule out the possibility of universal salvation, but I would rule out the idea of the salvation of one, as the Kingdom of God implies a necessary plurality, just as the Kingdom of the Damned also requires a necessary plurality.

In fact, I would suspect that the Kingdom of Heaven and Hell may be the same condition, the difference being only the attitude of the individual. One who loves God exclusively and best is no doubt thrilled, while one who loves created things may be in eternal agony. So all are potentially saved, but humans being humans, some choose to reject not only the gift of life but the gift of eternal life.

I don’t see anything wrong with saying it is wrong to discuss in an empirical fashion the history of American slavery, or to treat American slavery as the worst and most depraved historical conditions in the world.

However, this is no different from asserting faith in the Virgin Birth, e.g. the Virgin Birth is not a secular historical thesis, it is a religious dogma.

The dishonesty is that purported “seculars” are smuggling their faith demands into history, and they deserve the same ridicule and mockery as someone trying to introduce the Virgin Birth into the science of biology.

Perhaps we as Americans should have a set of unquestioned lies we tell ourselves and are placed above rational scrutiny. I am just not sure why distortions and lies about American slavery should be part of that system of lies.

In fact, American slavery in reality was nasty enough that we don’t have to lie about it, or pretend other systems of slavery weren’t in many ways worse. I don’t know of any American that wants to go back.

I think you miss that God granting the land of Canaan to the Israelites was seen as a great good to them. Its only the people living there before them that it was not good.

This is often the nature of the good, what is good for one is bad for another. The Prodigal Son parable is an attempt to address this reality, but the general move to take the particular good as the unfolding of some hidden and cosmic good, such as the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel as making way for the coming of the universal but particular God-Man.

LFM, now we’re getting a little closer. Its true, the rationalizations for slavery had a lot to do with the contradiction between a trend toward liberty for all, and the fact that a lot of dirty dangerous disagreeable jobs had to get done by someone. So, if someone is defined as not having liberty, everyone else can have it. (Philosophically its not unlike the artificially abstract situation in Ursula Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas.”)

One of the great unsettled controversies is whether prejudice against dark-skinned people was occasioned by their enslavement, or whether they were considered fit to be slaves because they were despised ipso facto for their dark skin. I lean toward the former, but its a little confusing given that almost every community in history has some degree of prejudice against everyone who is not them. E.g., most Native American tribes called themselves “The People” and all other tribes had descriptive names, often pejorative.

But singling out Africans as an inferior race, was I think secondary to the fact that they were primarily encountered as slaves, or selling others of the same color to be slaves. Ironically, one of the rationales for European colonial annexation of African territory was that the kingdoms being subjugated kept slaves.

Initially, Britain was doing a fine job exporting its criminal class to do the hard labor in North America. But the criminals tended over time, if they didn’t die of yellow fever first, to become farmers or entrepreneurs, and Britain didn’t really have enough petty thieves to fill up all the lowly jobs in North America. So Africans began to make up the difference, although there was a long period of overlap, up to the end of the 18th century. I’ve seen signs advertising a boatload of Welsh servants for sale in Charleston, and John Woolworth’s Diary refers to “my master bought some Scotch servants and brought them to Mt. Holly to sell.”

I won’t get too deep into the parallel conversation about God and the Bible. It is fascinating to see Janwaar Bibi come out as a Hindu atheist. His argument is at least plausible — the ancient Hebrews do seem to have been quite thuggish for a time. The best of what the Jewish faith has to offer didn’t really begin to emerge until after the Babylonian Exile.

The random variable in the mix is free will. Now that we know that life evolved over a long period of time, and with a lot of spontaneous violence, perhaps there is no God, or, perhaps God created a material world that he knew would be imperfect, but from which he could draw toward him those who would be drawn. Biological life is going to be biological life, curious hybrid primates into which a living soul had been breathed are going to have impulsive reflex responses, and its all going to be a mess… but perhaps headed toward something better.

There was only so much God could explain to twelve thuggish tribes surrounded by a bunch of equally thuggish tribes. There was only so much Mohammed could explain to a bunch of thuggish bands engaged in constant raids on each other and holding slaves — indeed, perhaps only so much God could explain to him. But over time, things do get incrementally better, sometimes.

“KD”, your argument about the “importance” of salvation seemed to boil down to the old saw, “if everyone is special, then nobody’s special”–which is typically said by the kid P.O.’d that some other kids got, you know, included. It sounded like you were conflating “important” with “good”, and drawing from that the conclusion that therefore there must be at least some that were damned. However, from what you say here, I was apparently misreading you. I am gratified that you at least acknowledge the possibility of universal salvation. I think that possibility is very high; I assume you think it’s lower; but I can live with that.

As to whether a person actually could go for all eternity as a holdout, refusing salvation, I discussed that at length and came to an inconclusive answer in this series; and in this essay I argue that given enough time, God can save everyone without violating their true free will.

Beyond that, we’ll just have to disagree. I certainly don’t see “good for one, bad for another” as a justification for genocide, and I do not believe God so commanded the Israelites.

Re: But singling out Africans as an inferior race, was I think secondary to the fact that they were primarily encountered as slaves, or selling others of the same color to be slaves.

At the earliest contacts between Europeans and Africans involving the Portuguese explorers, the tendency definitely was to treat the Africans on a near-equal basis, defective mainly in their lack of Christianity (which they shared with other decidedly civilized foreign folk like the Chinese). The King of Portugal treated the King of Kongo as an equal and when the latter converted to Christianity his son and heir was fostered for a time in Lisbon with all the honor given to a foreign prince. Of course at this point the Portuguese were also dependent on the goodwill of the various African rulers along the African coast to supply their ships with food and fresh water, so they had a strong incentive not to be abusive. This gradually changed as the Portuguese established their own bases on offshore islands and were less dependent on the goodwill of the locals. And it does need to be said that slavery already existed in these African states and the various kings were only too happy to sell rebels and captives to the Portuguese (and later to other Europeans). The Kongo became a small empire in partnership with Portugal, and a steady stream of conquered people fed the plantations across the ocean in Brazil. Things however did gradually change as the Portuguese became ever more greedy for slaves, and they began to disregard the Kongolese protocols and prerogatives on the trade, leading finally to war between the countries, the fall of the kingdom, and ultimately the Portuguese assumption of power over what is now Angola. And by then the myth of racial superiority was in the works to justify it.

Re: the ancient Hebrews do seem to have been quite thuggish for a time.

Curiously there’s no real evidence for the genocides recorded in the Old Testament, or even for a mass conquest by outsiders. There is evidence for internal revolt. However the Hebrew language (along with Phoenician) is a direct descendant of Old Canaanite.

The purpose of glorifying God is not giving God glory, he doesn’t need it.

The reality is that Creation is a self-giving act of Love by God, as is the Birth, Death and Resurrection of Christ.

Self-sacrifice on the part of humans for God is not about giving “back” to God, it is about imitating, and thereby, making divine, human existence. It is our self-giving that makes us sons of God, by, in and through the example of Jesus Christ.

It is God’s prejudices, if you will, preferring this one and not that, raising this one up for awhile then tearing him down, that makes God personal.

God’s prejudice, which is rooted in particularity, is what sets Him apart from some kind of moral universalist computer algorithm, or some cosmic “force”, or whatever you would have in His place.

One is perfectly free to reject the Biblical God, but we shouldn’t pretend He is like the God of the Deists, who makes a bunch of rules because He rationally ascertains wrong from right, and then leaves the universe on physicalist autopilot. We are the ones with the knowledge of good and evil.

Siarlys Jenkins,
Didn’t mean to imply that I thought Europeans necessarily perceived black Africans as an inferior race. In fact, I’m inclined to think that that view followed the establishment of black slavery rather than making it possible. The significance of black skin was not that it marked an inferior race but that it made the slave class easy to identify, which had all sorts of benefits in avoiding embarrassment and easing law enforcement. Everyone would *know* that this person with dark skin was a slave, an ex-slave or the product of a mixed-race liaison with a slave, making it harder for them to escape, or for white people to manumit slaves, take up liaisons with them, or be seen to engage with them as equals.

If we look at levels, you have the level of the individual and the collective. Morality takes place at the individual level when individuals are united in a collective.

The ancient political theories seem to envision that the collective is simply the individual writ large, e.g. the collective will be virtuous because the individuals composing it are virtuous.

Machiavelli had the clarity to see what functions at the individual level does not stand for the collective. Two collectives engaged in conflict are not subject to the same rules as two individuals in conflict under a system of norms and laws.

There can be no law without a territory subject to the jurisdiction of the law. There can be no morality without some level of legal sanction or tolerance. So there can be no “morality” governing a conflict such as the American example or the (hypothetical) example of the Israelites.

These can be contrasted with the Holocaust, because what you had was people integrated into the collectivity, and then denationalized and treated horribly. This is also the case with the Armenian genocide, or Rwanda.

I wouldn’t view the American treatment of the natives as “genocide” properly, or the actions of the Israelites (if true), either. They are just the product of warfare between two collectives.

There was a city that broke away from Kongo as the the latter was in decline, which won a significant battle with a Portuguese army, taking a number of prisoners. In accordance with their usual practice, they offered the Portuguese prisoners for sale as slaves to a Dutch merchant ship that happened by.

Curiously there’s no real evidence for the genocides recorded in the Old Testament, or even for a mass conquest by outsiders

There was a fascinating NOVA program a few years ago on what archaeology shows about the historicity of the Old Testament (link below). My understanding is that Biblical archaeologists now consider the Old Testament to be a work of literature rather than a historical account.

As you said in your post, the Israelites seem to have been Canaanites but at some point, they were joined by a small group of people from Egypt (Moses is an Egyptian name) who brought the idea of monotheism to them. Even after that, the Israelites were apparently polytheists and they worshiped both Yahweh and his consort Asherah, a Canaanite goddess – it was not until the Babylonian exile that the Israelites became monotheists. Quite a contrast to what one would be led to believe by the story of Moses and the ten commandments!

One of the Muslims who posted above wrote “we live with our contradictions and try to do better every day.” That is the most heart-warming thing I have read in a while, and those are words for all of us to live by, regardless of whether we are believers, agnostics or atheists.

Erica Kaine misses a few nuances… If people half way around the world allow an 80 year old Imam to take an eight year old child bride, we probably shouldn’t cut off all trade with that country, nor should we send in the marines to tell them how its going to be from now on. But, if the mother of that eight year old asks for asylum, we should provide it. If we offer college scholarships to student from that country, we should on the one hand make clear that its a felony to marry or even pursue an eight year old bride, and, endeavor to send them back with a view toward shifting the culture of their own country, if they can.

But there is a rather good black and white movie from the early days of the Cuban revolution about what a man dictates to his wife. And one made later in full color that was a bit more nuanced. I recommend them both.

Very interesting discussion going on about the nature of morality and God. Thank you all.

I hope to see more of the same level of meticulous academic considerations to be applied to the history or theology of Islam, as many fair non Muslim commentators actually did here.

Many missed one aspect of Professor Brown’s speech: He is trying to make a reasoned apology for Islam as a religion in a poisonous atmosphere where many lies and distortions are circulating about Islam.
I am not pointing to erudite serious criticisms (which would be fine) but to a mishmash of extravagant diabolizing accusations from a skewed perspective which distorts or superficially simplifies anything, from the meanings of words and to history; All this is done to further some now not so obscure political agenda, with an attitude much similar to the SJWs. This situation makes a meaningful intellectual dialogue (in the light of the day) almost impossible.

I would like to add the following comments as my own two pennies.

It was repeated a couple of times at least in the comment sections that “ALL slaves (in Islamic lands) were castrated.” and that’s “Why there is no descendants left.”. The first assertion is a gross exaggeration. The second one is illogical, since it does not answer what happened to the children of female slaves.

My explanation: According to the Islamic law (if we call it such for the purpose of this comment), concubinage was a well-defined position beyond just being a slave. Many laws of marriage applied to the female concubines too, which would not apply to them being just slaves. For example, obligatory period of wait after separation (=divorce in marriage) before a new relationship begins, or the interdiction of having a mother and daughter both as wife/concubine (i.e. taking one as concubine/wife would have made the other one forbidden as one’s own mother/daughter forever), or similarly the interdiction of both a father and a son taking the same wife/concubine even in case the previous relationship was dissolved by death, etc. Most importantly, the children of female concubines were legitimate, free, and immediately freed their mothers from the bond.
As far as I can tell, there were differences of opinion about whether the children of slaves married to each other should be considered in bond or free. That said marriage must have happened often, as it is
discussed in the law. So many male slaves also had offsprings.

Al-Mamun, a very famous Abbasid Calif, was the son of a slave (not just a descendent. His mother was a concubine). I know nothing about the North American slavery system, nor I am an expert in the delicate points of history of Islam. But I have still wait to see even one from the lineage of past north American slaves to become President (as Obama was apparently not one).
I admit there are many nuances to be considered and that’s a tall order to look into all aspects of the thing, specially from a theological/moral perspective. But the example I put forward above shows that there is a serious nontrivial difference in the overall approach to the problem of human bondage in the two relative cases with observable consequences.

Another comment: I have only one historical evidence (the Zanj Rebellion) for what I am going to say , and again I am not a historian. In this instance, it is clear that the “capitalist” style mass-exploitation of the slaves was practiced in the Islamicate, and that was possibly as ugly as it could get then. This documented capitalist exploitation was very well “condemnable” even from a strict Muslim perspective, if I can have an opinion about it, and I have no qualms about it. (Any other violent behavior towards the then slaves would be both immoral and would go against the letter of the Law.) The reaction – (the Zanj rebellion) seems to me to have been quite violent and extreme on its own terms and it threatened the Abbasids in their core lands. (By the way, it couldn’t have been an army of eunuchs, could it?) I guess I am writing this to emphasize that the reality on the field is usually different from the ideal which was supposed to be lived in an organic and holistic respect for the precepts of the religion; and this rule of thumb applies to the adherents of all religions and creeds of course.

In the present circumstances the slavery is abolished and returning to its practice
would be against the Shari’a, and that is the consensus of the scholars too.

I was reading the book of Judges recently. One reading could be that Samson made a terrorist suicide attack on innocent civilians
(the Philistines) and killed some three thousands of them in one instant at his death.

First, is it right to frame the text into this modern reading? Second, the question of morality again arises. Of course the book is silent about how God thought of his act. So this can be resolved by pretending that God did not want it to happen and it was Samson’s doing. But I always thought he were considered a hero, and I think that is a cheap way out to say that he was a criminal and it was not God who gave him back is power. Maybe you could say that it is not a historical story and the story is said only to have some moral lessons. But then, if you lionize Samson and at the same time read the story as I did the moral lesson is not so obvious. So what to say? Was he justified in doing what he did in the eyes of God, or not? And, is anybody willing to condemn Samson’s act here?

A few more hard questions, on a tangent: Are Prisons moral? Are POW camps moral? Are aerial bombardments moral? Was Dresden moral, not to talk about Hiroshima? Did a genocide take place in Dresden/Hiroshima? I am curious to know what your respective positions would be if you followed your respective logics to their ends.

(Official denial: Dear USCIS and HS and the others, the Samson’s example was only for rhetorical purposes. I did not mention it to draw a parallel to 9/11 attacks. The number 3000 is mentioned in the book of Judges and I believe it has no significance vis a vis our modern time events. I absolutely condemn the 9/11 terrorist attacks and all other terroristic attacks on innocent civilians. Please do not revoke my American citizenship, neither send me to Guantanamo, nor drone me.)

And even then, there are more nuances, but I cannot understand the full scope of your comment unless I know what the name of that Cuban movie is. Anyhow, the reality is more strange than what it seems:

Can anybody explain? Is this article a hoax? And if not, why wasn’t anybody mentioning/realizing that this is happening all these years? With all the modern sensitivities, this must have been stopped long ago, but then why not?

I think Ras Al-Ghoul offers a more reasoned explanation than the Georgetown professor. If Brown meant to say what Al-Ghoul is saying, then he did not do so very competently.

When and how should we apply current standards to past events and cultures? I would suggest, only when we are offering past events as a paradigm for what we are called to do now. I recall a southern Baptist minister in West Virginia who told a member of his church, well, if you really want to be literal about the Bible, next time your son is disobedient let me know, and we will take him out into a field and the elders will stone him to death. (Southern Baptists are known for their attention to Biblical Authority, but apparently they are a bit more nuanced about it than their detractors sometimes recognize.)

Neither Christianity nor Islam nor Judaism summarily abolished slavery by virtue of coming onto the scene, or assiduously focusing from the very beginning on working for abolition. Both arose on cultures and polities where slavery was normal, as indeed it was in most of the world. Both have had some effect on abolishing forms of caste subjugation, slave or otherwise, in certain times and places. (Many of the darker skinned inhabitants of India converted to Islam precisely because it freed them from their low-caste or untouchable status under Hindu laws and traditions).

One thing that has made Judaism rather pristine in the last several centuries is that until 1947, there was no place on earth where a Jewish establishment held power. Thus, Jews were always and everywhere a minority dependent upon the good will of their neighbors. They have not had the opportunity to commit the crimes that Christians and Muslims have committed, by virtue of having the power to do so. (Now, SOME Jews do, and other Jews are in a quandary over it.)

Samson lived in a time when Hebrews and Philistines were locked in a ruthless struggle for dominance, with hints that sometimes the Hebrews were almost totally subjugated. I don’t think the lesson echoing down the centuries is that the way to resolve political conflict is to kill 3000 people. It may be that if you do what God tells you things will go well for you, and when you depart from that path, you may lose a great deal.

But I must also note that Jewish tradition does NOT maintain that every word of the Tanach (aka Old Testament) is the revealed Word of God. That is a Christian interpretation. Jews revere the Torah (the first five books) as “words and music by the Creator of the Universe.” But the later books are referenced as “Writings” and “Nevi’im” — loosely translated prophecy. The Writings are historical chronicles of the Jewish people, not revelations from the Almighty. The books of the prophets are the best a human being could do at conveying to fellow humans an unutterably incomprehensible revelation of things no human is really capable of seeing. Thus, it is often rendered poetically.

Although it doesn’t motivate me to become Jewish in word faith life and doctrine, I find that Jewish tradition concerning the Old Testament is helpful in making sense of its significance, as is only to be expected. The alternative is to go full Marcionite, as some here have come close to.

It is certainly true that there is a good deal of mindless “extravagant diabolizing” of Islam. What is relevant today is what adherents of Islam practice today, and what they reference as their reasons. E.g., there are substantial territories where Islam is the dominant faith, in which female genital mutilation is standard. Apparently, Islamic faith has not abolished the practice. But, it was not initiated by Islam, and there are many Islamic areas where it is unknown. Actually, there are Christians in southeast Africa who defend it as a Christian practice — but really, it is a traditional practice they have not given up which they therefore syncretize with their Christian faith. Many Muslims have undoubtedly done the same.

My understanding is that Biblical archaeologists now consider the Old Testament to be a work of literature rather than a historical account.

As you said in your post, the Israelites seem to have been Canaanites but at some point, they were joined by a small group of people from Egypt (Moses is an Egyptian name) who brought the idea of monotheism to them.

There are many fascinating programs in which someone who has done reasonably credible research recounts “we used to believe this, but now we understand that what is really true is…” Later on we learn that that wasn’t really quite right either. Take the fixation of archaeologists and popular science programs on the notion that Rameses II was the Pharoah of the Exodus. Rameses is known to have had armies all over Palestine, fighting with the Hittites of Anatolia. He would have had trouble catching a band of runaway slaves? Even if they did wander through the Sinai for forty years? Dubious.

Whereas, the fall of the Middle Kingdom, and the subsequent interregnum, fits the events of Exodus rather well. It also means that the Biblical periods when kings of Israel dealt with Pharoahs in Egypt, would fit better the known facts of Rameses’s reign, and his successors. Some major rethinking of timelines would be necessary.

That could also be wrong. But the latest NOVA program is only telling us the latest tentative theorizing based on a small portion of recently discovered evidence, which itself is susceptible to many interpretations.

Thanks for your thoughtful query. I would not really call myself a modern Marcionite, because I don’t think the Old Testament as a whole is entirely inspired. I think there’s a spectrum of views one can take towards the Old Testament. “Divinely inspired and still in complelete effect”, as most Muslims hold, whould be at one extreme. “Divinely inspired and partly in effect”, e.g. with the moral principles continuing to hold and with the ceremonial laws obsolete, would be the standard orthodox Christian position. “Inspired by a false / lesser / demonic entity” would be the Gnostic / Marcionite position and it’s not one that I can completely support either. I’ve moved further along the spectrum, but not all the way to the other end.

I think the Old Testament is a human work, drawing on a lot of different sources, and containing a lot of different ideas of varying levels of moral authority. Some of it is, obviously, “true” in some sense. It prophecies Jesus Christ, for a start. But you’re right, in the last analysis I wouldn’t look to it as an authority either, and I wouldn’t treat it as the inerrant word of God in the same way as the Gospels. I’d look at the Old Testament, in other words, the same way that orthodox Christians traditionally look at other religious or philosophical traditions, like those of the Greeks. Not everything in them is necessarily wrong, but it isn’t automatically right either.

In response to your question about moral guidance, I think in the last analysis the best moral guide all of us have is conscience, reasoning on the basis of intuition and facts about the human condition, and yes, “natural law” of sorts. (Not in the Aristotelian sense necessarily, but in the sense of reasoning about what contributes to human flourishing and the flourishing of other creatures, about what minimizes harm to others, what it means to be genuinely loving and just, and so forth). There are problems with reliance on conscience, natural law, and ideals of human flourishing, obviously. But I’d say there are at least as great problems with reliance on divine command theory, and moreover I’d also say that you can’t really get away from judging things by the light of conscience and reason, even if you are the most orthodox of believers.

Jesus works as a moral authority in part because the evidence from the New Testament and Church tradition indicates that he was a perfect man, and you can only believe that if you have an independent standard of perfection separate from Jesus. Same goes for God the Father, really. Being the most powerful being in the world isn’t enough to make a being worthy of worship, is it? Nor is doing miracles. After all, plenty of Hindu holy men today claim to do miracles, we know the Antichrist will eventually be able to perform miracles, and if I was convinced that the God of Islam, or the Aztec God, was the true God, I certainly wouldn’t want to worship him.

The Gospel reading last week was the one from the Sermon on the Mount, forbidding anger, lying, etc.. I found that a very powerful reading before I ever believed that the historical accounts about the life and resurrection of Jesus were true, and I find it an equally powerful reading today, which indicates that the force of the reading is independent of what you think about Jesus. I really dislike the Declaration of Independence, but to use their phraseology, some things are really “self evident”, and the idea that this would be a better world if we were all honest and truthful, even to the point of avoiding deceptions that fall short of lies, is self evident at least to my heart. That’s why I can read, “You have heard it said to the men of ancient time, Do not swear falsely. But I say to you, do not swear at all….Let your communication be “Yea, yea”, or “nay, nay”, anything more than these comes of evil….” and conclude several things:

1) This is true, even if it hurts and is difficult. There’s no arguing with the prohibition itself, the question now is how best to follow it.

2) The person who said this was something very unusual in human history, and put together with the rest of what we know about Jesus, points to something even more unusual.

All of which is to say, yes, I think natural law (interpreted broadly) and reasoning about human flourishing is ultimately a better moral guide than citing the Old Testament as an authority. (As you rightly point out, moral teaching in the Gospels, especially in John, is fragmentary at best, so with the exception of a few places reliance on the New Testament doesn’t really solve our problems either).

In regard to the choice you pose (that the moral law is independent of God, or that God defines the moral law), I would (tentatively) say I pick the first option. I would join you in rejecting the second option, and it’s never been clear to me exactly what “goodness is inseparable from God’s nature” even means. I can’t conceive of saying “God is perfectly good” without having a standard independent of God by which we define “goodness”.

Moving on, this is a really interesting challenge here:

In a nutshell: if one supposes an all-powerful God exists, then it’s a far, far larger problem than just the Canaanite babies or Amalakite sheep. It’s the suffering of countless billions or trillions of living beings since the world began. It’s every child that died in agony from bone cancer, every calf raised for veal in a tiny cage, every baby morn with hydrocephela–and anything else you can imagine.

Dawkins liked to score rhetorical points, but his famous quote barely scratches the surface of the problem of evil. Do you believe in a God that, at a mere word, a tiny thought in His infinite mind, at no cost to His reserve of power, sees all this suffering and does…nothing? Or arbitrarily chooses this child will be healed, this child will die?

You don’t even need an all-powerful God for this to be a problem. One merely as strong as the pagan gods of ancient Greece, or heck, as powerful as one of the X-men.

You raise the criticism against Marcionism and Gnosticism that even if you throw out the Old Testament, it doesn’t exonerate God since there is plenty of ‘natural evil’ inherent in creation. An easy answer to that is that Marcionites and Gnostics didn’t generally believe that God had created the universe, and the Gnostics at least didn’t believe in omnipotence. But then you go on make the really good point that even if we believe in a limited God, it doesn’t completely do away with the question of, “why doesn’t God intervene in this particular case.”

My answer there would partly rely on the idea there’s a big difference between actively commanding or enacting evil, and passively tolerating it. God might have allowed American slavery to exist as part of His determination to respect human free will, including the choice to do evil: that’s very much distinct (in my mind) from actively commanding his followers to hold people in slavery.

More generally, I think you can argue that free will (of humans and of angelic entities) requires the existence of natural and moral evil, or at least the possibility of natural and moral evil, and still draw a distinction between tolerating that, and actively commanding genocides, actively creating evil situations, and so forth. The old active-passive distinction from moral philosophy, more or less.

Now…that may not directly answer your question, but I think we need to address the heart of the issue. I’m asking “who are you–or me–to question God’s morality?” Not because we dare such irreverent presumption (though it is that, but not why you think); rather, can someone demonstrate why their ethical system by which they judge God is more than simply some combination of modern enlightenment values scented by a vauge wiff of a sentimentalized version of the ethics of the Nazarene?

Anyway, your thoughts would be appreciated.

I don’t think “who are you to question God” is a very good response. First, because the whole issue under debate here is whether certain things are true of God: whether He created the world (and how much of a direct hand He had in creation), and whether He inspired the Old Testament. Those of us taking issues with orthodoxy are arguing over those two points, not really about God’s moral character. Secondly, I don’t think being a really powerful being, per se makes one worthy of praise or immune from criticism. (I would also quibble a bit with your poetic invocation of monarch butterflies, etc.: I don’t think the natural world is as well designed as all that, but that’s a separate issue and not all that relevant to your point).

Again, if it were shown that the creator of the world was actually the Muslim God, or for that matter Brahma or one of the Greek gods, would you feel compelled to view them as perfectly good, and to worship them?

As far as “Enlightenment values sentimentalized by the Nazarene”, that’s certainly a fair criticism. (I dislike a lot of the Enlightenment, but certainly my moral views have been conditioned by modernity, and in spite of all my intense criticisms of America and the West I still prefer them to the society of the ancient Hebrews). The problem is one can make exactly that same argument (and many have) about the morality of the Old Testament. Evolutionary biologists have a very clear explanation of exactly why Old Testament sexual morality (and the institution of marriage in general) originated: to control female fertility (and more specifically to provide assurance of paternity so that property and paternal investment could be directed only towards one’s genetic offspring). Likewise, Janwaar Bibi can dismiss much of the Old Testament as propaganda thought up by a Middle Eastern tribe to justify subjugating and in many cases killing their neighbors: can you demonstrate why that isn’t the case either? It’s an unfair question, but it’s unfair in both cases. The question to be answered is whether Old Testament morality or some alternative moral system is actually a better moral system, it’s not a question of whether we can provide an alternative account of how a moral worldview might have originated.

Thank you for the link. It is amusing that his enemy is the “alt-right” which has threatened him and his family, and disputes his thesis.

I suspect in reality the community who finds his reflections objectionable may be a little wider than the “alt-right”.

I don’t think many African-Americans are all that big on slavery apologetics coming from anyone, anywhere, for example. But I suppose they are just a bunch of “alt-right hoteps” or something.

More interesting is he doesn’t actually disavow any of his comments, he simply indicates it was a mistake to express them publicly, and then insists with slavery, its complicated. Yeah, duh, you won’t find a topic anymore difficult to address with historical accuracy and nuance than slavery!

Actually, I have to admire that he had the intestinal fortitude to say what he said in a public manner on such a controversial subject, notwithstanding my belief that he is wrong and an apologist for Islam.

The impetus for anti-slavery was the British and anti-slavery was imposed on the world through the power of the British Empire and Navy. The fact that not only ISIS but Boko Haram have re-instituted slavery, and even some Shi’ite Ulema are calling for its revival suggests as the power of Anglo (e.g. white) political and cultural hegemony wane, the world is likely to see more and more atavistic returns to practices like slavery, female genital mutilation, polygamy, and widow burning.

Certainly I’m not at the level of Abraham or Moses or Jeremiah, all of whom actually did question God’s morality (Genesis 18:16-33, Exodus 32, and Jeremiah 20:7). “Israel” means “he struggled with God”, the very theme for Judaism and Christianity–struggling with God, not taking things as nicely and neatly pat. Also in this context, I strongly support Socrates, who also questioned Divine morality in the Euthyphro which argues (and on which I comment here) that the gods must be held to the same standards of morality as humans, if their morality is to be meaningful.

In a very loose and impressionistic way, I think God had to allow the type of universe we have in order to give maximum sway to differentiation. All beings had to be alienated to some level in order that their return to God would be free, at least on the deepest level, and that they would not be the mere puppets they’d have been if they’d been incapable of sin (I discuss it a little bit here and here). Some of these beings–fallen angels or demons, to say nothing of other people–make things even worse than they have to be.

The link Ras al-Ghoul provides seems to reflect that there is a lot more to Brown’s thinking and understanding of history, of slavery, and of Islam, than was recognized in this discussion.

Again, if it were shown that the creator of the world was actually the Muslim God, or for that matter Brahma or one of the Greek gods, would you feel compelled to view them as perfectly good, and to worship them?

There is a simple prayer that begins “God is great, God is good…” I’ve occasionally speculated, what if God was BAD, but still as great and powerful and omnipotent as we think he is? What recourse would we have? Now it may be that there is something inherent in being God that makes God good, but still, if ANY vision of God were shown to be True, what choice would we have?

But based on what we do know, its true, the very debate is about WHETHER certain things are true of God.

Above is the link, again, to Dr. Brown’s response to the attacks – for the most part, sensationalized hit pieces – on his academic paper.

All aspects of life are covered by Islamic Law, as by Jewish Law. If Muslim scholars are pressured not to speak about a given area of law, of life and history, those who pressure them not to do so are responsible for the discussion on that subject being limited increasingly to those who are not concerned with threats to their family and slurs from adherents to the Coulter-Spencer cult. This is similarly the case with jihad; American Muslim scholars silence themselves because they know the responses that would come. These attacks, however, will not make the views disappear. They will simply mean that those who hold educated, well-meaning and ‘mainstream’ views on the subjects will not address them publicly, while the voices that are heard will be the immoderate, malicious and fringe, unconcerned with respectability or maintaining their employment.

As always, Islamophobes and the extremist Islamists hold hands. As always, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that is sought after, blindly.

Rod, you often point out that, ‘if they can come for Barronelle on this issue, they will come for you next.’ This is true enough, and a useful warning. My response, then, to your post above is that – since this country is only going to become less, not more, Christian – if serious voices of religious scholarship, especially when they are addressing controversial subjects, are to have their employment in academia called into question on stating something which seems ‘politically incorrect’ with regard to their tradition – well, if they can hound Dr. Brown, they (and they can be either right- or left- leaning modernists, there is no meaningful difference) will, as you know, hound Christians – except for the ‘tame’ Christians – as well.

The response that this has something to do with Georgetown being Catholic is unpersuasive, as when was the last time that anyone expected Georgetown to present only or even primarily ‘the Catholic position’ (whatever that is at this point)?

Also, a commenter above suggests that most African-Americans would find themselves perhaps particularly opposed to Dr. Brown’s paper. I would suggest that this is false, and it is worth noting that the co-author of the paper delivered by Dr. Brown is Shaykh Abdullah ibn Hamid Ali, an African-American Muslim scholar. Likewise, there are many African-American Muslims – entirely devoted to their Prophet and his Example – who would in no way be opposed, to say the least, to Dr. Brown’s discussion of the concept and meaning of slavery and to its varying significance and circumstances in Islamic and other societies and history. I haven’t yet, for the record, come across any African-Americans taking umbrage to the paper; rather, it is almost uniquely those with a tendency to read all things Islamic in the most negative light that have reacted against this paper (against, rather, their general idea of this paper).